Quotes from Robert Creeley

He lives out in Orchard Park. I mean, to be able to sit on the bench so patiently, for whatever part, and to be able to get up and do something, with such heroic competencies would be great.

Oh well, I will say here, knowing each man, let you find a good wife too, and love her as hard as you can.

Writing is the same as music. It's in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don't play is as important as what you do say.

My nature is a quagmire of unresolved confessions.

God give you pardon from gratitude and other mild forms of servitude.

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

No matter how wild reality was obviously often being, it was an absolutely secure place, as a tone and intelligence, and a thing happening.

I will go to the garden. I will be a romantic. I will sell myself in hell, in heaven also I will be.

The irony of our social group is that so often everyone feels this, but there's no company whatsoever in that feeling. Think of Pound's great emphasis, the way out is via the door.

drive, he sd, forchrist's sake, lookout where yr going.

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

How can I die alone.Where will I be then who am now alone,what groans so patheticallyin this room where I am alone?

Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!

Into the company of loveit all returns.

You've left a lot out Being in doubt you left it out Your mother Aunt Bernice in Nokomis to the west and south (?) in trailer park Dead now for years as one says You've left them out David your son Your friend John You've left them out You thought you were writing about what you felt You've left it out Your love your life your home your wife You've left her out No one is one No one's alone No world's that small No life You left it out

The century was well along when I came in and now that it's ending, I realize it won't be long. But couldn't it all have been a little nicer, as my mother'd say. Did it have to kill everything in sight, Did right always have to be so wrong?

The Answer" Will we speak to each other making the grass bend as if a wind were before us, will our way be as graceful, as substantial as the movement of something moving so gently. We break things into pieces like walls we break ourselves into hearing them fall just to hear it.

Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rain, the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness.

I know this body is impatient. I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind. Yet I loved, I love. I want no sentimentality. I want no more than home.

Moon, moon, when you leave me alone all the darkness is an utter blackness, a pit of fear, a stench, hands unreasonable never to touch. But I love you. Do you love me. What to say when you see me.

The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.

What am I to myself that must be remembered, insisted upon so often? Is it that never the ease, even the hardness, of rain falling will have for me something other than this, something not so insistent— am I to be locked in this final uneasiness.

Memories Hello, duck, in yellow cloth stuffed from inside out, little pillow.

When I speak, I speaks.